As you can probably imagine, there are many such men and women in this world of ours, and I know they can profit from your experience, and by knowing of the worth you have found in the added years since 1994. Please help me do this, Ruby, because your message can bring peace of mind to far more people than you may imagine. These years of our friendship-from-afar have been important to me, and I know they can also be important to countless people whom neither of us will ever meet.
For the first time, Ruby’s response arrived by e-mail, via Rames. She described the reasons “why I should go on living.”
That my life was not for myself alone, but also for others around me, especially for those with whom I have a strong emotional relationship. [Our correspondence] made me understand that in spite of growing old and infirm, I still had the ability to give something to others. This sense of being able to give and not just take, makes living worthwhile. When the mind and brain still function, one can contribute even a tiny bit for the benefit of those with whom one has a relationship of love and trust.
On receiving this, I wrote to Rames asking him to put one additional question to his mother, so that she might again write out her response for him to transfer to e-mail. “Were an elderly man or woman in despair (as she was when our correspondence began in 1994) to approach her, how would she advise such a person? What are the sorts of things she would tell her or him, so that they might understand the value of life?”
Ruby’s response came ten days later.
If anyone in similar circumstances approached me twelve years ago, I would have advised them to do just what I was wanting to do. But [our correspondence] then changed everything. I came to know that things were not as dark as I thought they were. Now I would tell them that there is meaning in life. We should have patience and look at life from a different angle. I now try to avoid doing something that I would regret later in life. This regret can be very painful and it is better to suffer if [suffering] benefits those whom I love. This gives me more satisfaction than the little bit of pain that I have to endure. You know all of these things, Shep. This is nothing new that I am trying to say, [namely] that I should give more thought to those with whom I have a loving and emotional relationship. That is the essence of life. This is what keeps me going. I love to travel and visit interesting places but I can no longer do this. I enjoyed having good food but this is now severely restricted. What I have is more than eighty years of experience of life. What I have learned from this helps me face the future.
Reading these words, I found myself thinking of some lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Lay Morals: “So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
We serve, we are indispensable, we have value in another’s eyes and therefore in our own. The sense of being needed is the sense of purpose we all must find if life is to keep its meaning. We must treasure one or more others, and in the treasuring be treasured.
What Ruby had acquired in her more than eighty years of life is that precious alloy of knowledge and experience that we call wisdom. She had learned nothing new from our correspondence, nothing of which she had not been aware for most of her life. But before we began writing, she had allowed her own good sense to become submerged in a flood of self-pity, and she had come perilously close to making a decision of incalculable inconsistency with the principles on which she had based her life, the principles forgotten in despondency. Her obsession with lost powers and acquired debilities had pushed her so deeply into despair’s pit that she had not the will to make any attempt at rising above it. Those who have made upward gains out of the chronic muck of despond know how slowly they are achieved, proceeding as they must through the acquired habit of faulty judgment and the molasses of doubt. In this sense, they are rather like the attempt to change the counterproductive behavior of a lifetime, which is discussed in earlier chapters.
Ruby had our exchanges of letters to help her. For every person who can push him or herself upward unaided, there is at least one other who needs help, whether from a friend or loved one or from someone professionally trained. It was guidance that Ruby had asked for in her first letter, and there are circumstances in which that guidance requires someone trained to provide it. The role of a therapist in such a situation becomes the role of a friend. Sometimes the first evidence of ascent is the choice to seek help.
Whether from a best friend or a paid best friend, what must be achieved is the connectedness of which Leo Cooney spoke. If it has been lost, it will have to be found again. It is the food by which the spirit is sustained, the drink in which the cells of our soul must be bathed. We require relatedness to others, both as individuals and as groups. By this means, we avoid or overcome the dreadful aloneness, the sense of helplessness that the aloneness abets.
If we have allowed our lives and our relationships to attenuate and narrow to such an extent that our connectedness to others has frayed or separated, there is a reaching out that must be done, and repairs that must be made. When the ancient Hebrew sages inscribed their dictum of tikkun olam, repairing the world, they included the world within as much as the world without, encompassing the world of our closest relationships. The repair of severed relationships has no “use by” date. It is never too late to reach out and forgive others, and to forgive ourselves. What usually requires forgiving is not so much the presumed cause of the breach as having allowed it to magnify its significance beyond sense or reality.
As important as these matters are at any time in life, they assume massive proportions as we age. There is an inner stubbornness that must be overcome, and it should be recognized as the pernicious thing that it is. And there is a self-righteousness, too, which is as harmful to ourselves as to those who are its object. We like to think that we acquire sagacity with age, but every retained grudge is a clue to immaturity.
When I mull over the factors that contributed to Ruby’s renewed sense of the reality of her life and that have continued to buoy her confidence that “life still has its charms,” I am reminded of a brief speech recently given by a much-valued friend at a gathering to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. Michael Bessie is one of that small cadre of legendary New York book editors who thrived during what might be called the golden era of publishing in the decades after World War II. Were there a Hall of Fame for such things, he would certainly be in it. With good health, two titanium knees, and no possible reason to fully retire, he lives with his wife, Cornelia, in the small and very Yankee town of Lyme, Connecticut. The Bessies have long had the most elegant of pieds-à-terre, in a brownstone on Washington Square in New York City. Gathered in the apartment late on a blustery January afternoon in 2006 was a group of perhaps forty men and women—many within a few years of Michael’s own age—whose presence represented milestones in his distinguished career and the close friendships it has engendered. At the height of the celebration the host delivered himself of a characteristically witty disquisition on any number of things, including not only the value of long friendship but also the secrets that one must know if he is to attain great old age and still feel that the world is his oyster. “It is important to now and then have an adventure,” he said, “and by that I mean an experience where you don’t know how it will come out.” He had told me much the same several times in the past, so I knew that this was no mere toss-off, but rather a principle of whose validity he was certain.
Of course, such a notion hardly applies to everyone. In fact, the basis of Miriam Gabler’s equanimity is the very opposite. She has found her contentment in peace of mind through ordinary things. She might well enjoy an adventure, but she hardly needs it as something on which to base her sense of purpose or her hopes for the future. And yet, it can do wonders for some to vivify an outlook and fulfill Charles Kingsley’s dictum that “all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” Miriam is enthusiastic about the everyday things that smooth the cour
se of her hours. She understands that what counts is less the what of what we do than the dignity and grace with which we do it. But many people need something explosive from time to time, and for them the advice of Michael Bessie is just right.
Ruby’s adventures were the voyages she made unaccompanied. Whether their highlights took place on an African plain or within the complexities of airports in the course of traveling, she frequently had no idea how “it will come out.” From her letters, I could tell how much she enjoyed the challenge inherent in the very unpredictability of her complex adventures, trying to make her way from one stopping point to another.
Michael Bessie spoke that day also of the need always to have a project. For him, a project is the undertaking of publishing a new book, but he does not restrict his meaning to projects at work. For approximately three years prior to his ninetieth birthday he was engaged in the entanglements of constructing a large library room adjoining his home in Lyme, to house the enormous collection of books accumulated over a long literary lifetime, until then stored in various places in both cities where he lives. A project is a kind of adventure, and vice versa. In addition to being her adventures, Ruby’s travels are also her projects, from the day she begins to plan them through their execution and her return home. My first intimation that she was emerging from her existential torpor was hearing that she had been to Nigeria, an adventure if ever there was one.
Of the several lessons to be learned from Ruby’s story, perhaps the one of most basic significance to those who are pessimistic in the face of advancing years can be expressed in a simple sentence: We must never allow ourselves the luxury of despair. There is a certain self-indulgence in giving up, and it takes great heart and strong will to go on when the clouds blacken, because the easy way is to give in to the pessimism. But as Ruby herself would agree, the fear of aging is usually worse than the aging itself. Before you conclude that your options are limited, you need evidence that you cannot do something, rather than just deciding that you cannot do it.
With so many proofs of that proposition, I hardly needed the one that came after that exchange of e-mails, but it pleases me immensely to have it: Ruby’s next letter reported that she had recovered from what proved to be a temporary setback, and had been shown not to have Parkinson’s disease. She was already planning her next adventure, traveling to London for three weeks to be with her granddaughter who is now living there, and then on to the United States, where she will have an extended visit with Rames and Ratna in Colorado. November 20, 2006, is the date of her eighty-fifth birthday.
ADDING CENTURIES TO OUR YEARS
I have been dealing until now with life as we know it, in which aging is an inevitable accompaniment of being human, and the days of our years have a natural limit imposed by membership in the species Homo sapiens. Because individuals of that species are the only animals with awareness that they will one day die, the instinct of self-preservation and the fear of death stand always in the wings of their minds, like unwelcome intruders waiting to leap out onto the stage to disrupt the serenity of the ongoing performance of being.
Fear of aging is more than fear of decrepitude. Ultimately it is fear of death. Since the predilection to avoid death is inherent in every biological structure and system, from cells to fully formed organisms; since it is an underlying theme of natural selection; since uncountable trillions of trillions of physicochemical mechanisms have evolved to preserve the life of every plant and animal large or small; since everything in our structure, our physiology, and that extraordinary concept we call mind militates against giving in to death—as a consequence of all this, is it any wonder that humankind has always been obsessed with the notion of life extension and even eternal existence?
Some would go so far as to claim that religion developed among us in order to provide reassurance that death is not final, that something of us goes on. Belief in God is belief in the supernatural, and if there is a supernatural—especially a benevolent and caring one—there is hope for some form of living beyond the mortal shape of it that we know. In this scheme of things, destiny is circumvented by faith, and the instinct for self-preservation presents itself in the nurturing thought that our lives, in one or another manifestation, will continue. Seen this way, religion becomes the paradoxical product of an inherent biological drive. Neither we nor God need ever die.
The earliest records of civilization already provide evidence of a preoccupation with afterlife as a way of prolonging existence forever. But for some, spiritual or religious faith have not been enough—these people have taken action on their own. In every generation, our forebears have used the knowledge and technology available to them to conceive or devise methods meant to rejuvenate and prolong themselves. The primitive period, the Egyptian era, the classical age, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the birth of modern science in the nineteenth century, and the decades of revolutionary discoveries in the twentieth—all epochs of history have sought and found their own approaches through which to express humankind’s need to deal with the inborn drive to deny death. Magic and incantations and then formulae and potions gave way after centuries to testicular extracts and surgical implantations of animal glands, all in the service of rejuvenation and its promise of eternal youth and therefore life. As science and its clinical applications became so remarkably sophisticated after the mid-twentieth century, the overt emphasis increasingly focused on rejuvenation from aging, but the unacknowledged basis for all strivings toward such enhancements remained the instinctual fear of senescence and death.
With the discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953, the rules of the ages-old game underwent a radical transformation. It now became possible to think in terms of altering the genetic predisposition to aging. Sugarplums were soon dancing in the heads of more than a few of the less restrained of the molecular biologists, who began to dream of life extension to 250 years or more, by tinkering up the human genome.
On its most direct level, this effort might begin with a determined search to identify a gene that controls the aging process, and so modify its structure that the entire sequence of events would be slowed. In fact, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Cynthia Kenyon, has identified just such a “master” gene in the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. That gene appears to regulate the behavior of many other genes, all of which are in one way or another related to the metabolic changes that result in senescence. By modifying this so-called daf-2 gene, Dr. Kenyon has been able to extend the life span of C. elegans from its normal twenty days to more than six times that figure.
That there is no evidence for the existence of such a gene in higher animal species has not by a whit slowed efforts to find one, nor does it appear to have dampened Kenyon’s enthusiasm for the academic and, one assumes, the financial bonanza that awaits her should one be discovered. She and others are partners in a commercial enterprise incorporated with a name that echoes evocatively down the corridors of time as Elixer Pharmaceuticals, whose goal is nothing less than to produce a pill to prevent or slow aging.
Equally tantalizing to some scientists—and investors as well—is the potential they see in a structure called the telomere, which sits almost like a cap at the end of each molecule of DNA. Each time a cell divides, the telomere decreases in length. This shrinkage can be stopped or even reversed by contact with the enzyme telomerase, which allows the cell to continue dividing and, accordingly, live longer. The application of telomerase technology has resulted in a significant increase in the number of times a cell in laboratory culture can reproduce before finally dying. Despite no shred of evidence that the shortening or lengthening of telomeres can in any way affect an entire organism or human longevity, teams of biogerontologists are avidly pursuing its possibilities as a panacea for aging, and the wallets of venture capitalists open widely to follow suit.
Neither the scramble to find a “master aging gene” nor the cellular efficacy of telom
ere lengthening has shown evidence of any potential to add so much as an hour to human life, but there is one avenue of research that has already proven its usefulness, at least as high up in the animal chain as mammals, and perhaps even in the mammal called Homo sapiens. I refer here to dietary restriction, which since 1935 has been known to extend life expectancy in rats. The rats under study were fed 50 percent of their normal caloric intake, but there is reason to believe that even lesser deprivation may have significant effects on longevity. The evidence for this comes from the study of Okinawans, whose average life expectancy of seventy-eight and eighty-six years for men and women respectively is higher than that of any industrialized society. This has been attributed to a number of factors, but none is considered more important than diet, especially because the island’s residents take in a smaller number of calories and get less of their energy from fat than we do. In fact, their centenarians ingest 10 to 20 percent fewer calories than is present in the typical American diet. Substantial reduction in caloric intake not only adds significantly to length of life, but also slows aging changes in the musculoskeletal, nervous, and endocrine systems, and reduces the frequency of cancer as well as certain other degenerative diseases.
Though the biologic reasons for the success of dietary restriction are not yet known, several reasonable explanations, or a combination of them, have been invoked. It has long been well known, for example, that the body automatically slows its rate of metabolism when fed fewer calories, no doubt as a survival mechanism in the face of possible starvation. This slowing is thought to slow the production also of the free radicals that are the by-product of normal metabolism. Because they injure DNA molecules, free radicals contribute to the accumulation of the irreversible cellular damage that ages tissues and organs. Free radicals, incidentally, are the highly reactive oxygen-containing molecules whose effects are said to be combated by the antioxidant pills taken by so many hopeful people.
The Art of Aging Page 16